


We Are a Woven Thread

by Scribe



Category: Mistworld Fictional TV Series Campaign
Genre: F/M, Kink, Sibling Incest, that's it that's literally the whole fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 16:11:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20799410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: One Nyka wants to be told he’s good. The other Nyka wants to be told he’s hers.





	We Are a Woven Thread

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aria/gifts).

> Title from Vienna Teng's _Breaking Light_, since that's pretty much the anthem for these guys. Enormous, enormous thanks to feedingonwind and fiercynn for going SO far above and beyond betaing this thing, it wouldn't have been possible at all without their input.
> 
> \----
> 
> I started writing this fic sometime in early season 4, I think, so at this point it's definitely a canon divergent AU! The exact plot is not all that relevant, ha, but for context I was imagining a season 5 in which our heroes used some bubbling magic to prevent the immediate apocalypse, and then were able to live somewhat peacefully on their close-to-original timeline while trying to stabilize everything else. So that's vaguely where this fic is set, I didn't predict them becoming GODS by the end of the show, thanks ARA.

**One**

For two men who are technically the same person, Rai’s brothers need very different things from her. 

**Two: Apocalypse Nyka**

It starts after they’ve been sleeping together for several months. Rai shakes off a many-hour fog of tinkering one night to realize both that she’s starving and that something smells incredible in the kitchen. She emerges from her room, stretching, to find him stirring some kind of egg concoction that looks like it was inspired by a rummage through the cabinets for what needed using. He’s good enough to share it; they eat it with two spoons over the pan. 

“Rai, I have a question,” he says as they’re polishing it off.

“Mmm?”

“The others were talking, at dinner, about the first time you all got transported to the mistworld.” He takes the pan and spoons and goes to wash them- less out of any fanaticism for cleaning, she judges, than because it gives him a good excuse not to meet her eyes. 

“They were joking about how you got caught in the middle of a one-night stand, and how you, um… when you disappeared, you left the guy tied to the bed and he had to figure out how to get out.”

There isn’t actually a question anywhere in there, but she takes pity on him and answers as if there were.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I do enjoy that kind of thing sometimes, but I like us, too. I promise I’m not settling, or wishing things were different, or anything like that.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. A flush creeps over his face, bright enough that it shows even through the green tint of his skin. “That’s not what I wanted to ask you, though.”

And well, he’s her brother. She lost him and found him and dragged him through hell and back to keep him with her; of course she’ll give him anything he wants.

**Three: Shadow Nyka**

This Nyka is less inclined to express himself in words, though he’ll try if she asks. She rarely has trouble interpreting his actions, though. In a way, he’s even more straightforward than his counterpart.

With him, it starts one afternoon, both of them down to their underthings and her on top of him on the bed, and an insistent pounding at the door.

“Shit,” she says, looking up at the clock. “I forgot I told Alokas he could come pick up that fog machine I promised him this afternoon. You’re distracting, you know.”

“Ignore him and he’ll go away?” suggests Nyka.

“Yeah, have you met Alokas?” she says. If she’s not mistaken, the knocking has taken on the cadence of one of Terraw’s latest hits. It’s a very long song.

“He’s not _that_ distracting,” says Nyka, sliding his hands up her thighs. It’s persuasive, but Rai prides herself on her willpower; she grabs his wrists and pins them firmly to the bed.

“Stay there,” she says. “This’ll only take a minute.” She climbs off him, considers finding some of her discarded clothing, and in the end just grabs the machine off the table and goes to answer the door. She and Alokas have seen each other in worse states.

She returns to the bedroom afterward and stops short in the doorway, discarding a half-formed apology. Nyka is lying exactly where he was when she told him to stay. His hands are flat on the bed in a slightly unnatural position, just where she put them, and he hasn’t turned his head to look at her. The expression on his face is, fascinatingly, something that looks almost like defiance.

He holds still while Rai lingers in the doorway, thinking fast, and he holds still while she walks around the end of the bed, though his eyes track her as she sheds the rest of her clothes. He even holds still while she climbs back on the bed, barely twitching a muscle when she settles her full weight on him. He meets her eyes and she grins, pleased and proud and only half-calculated when she tells him,

“Perfect.”

\--- 

She does still have the rope the other Nyka had obliquely asked about, but she never takes it out for this one. He’s spent too much of his life being held and controlled against his will; neither of them have any desire to play at that. Besides, she has no need for restraints with him. She tells him where she wants him, or puts him in place with her own hands, and he holds himself there with a kind of fierce, proud determination, like staying still for her is the most important challenge there is. 

The only thing he doesn’t still is his breathing, though Rai knows that he doesn’t actually need to breathe anymore. Maybe it’s just habit. Maybe it’s something important to him, or maybe he’s doing it for her sake, though she’s never told him to- she’s trying her hardest to love him exactly as he is now. She can’t help but be grateful, though, for every rise and fall of his chest.

Sometimes it takes her own breath away, watching his elegant fingers tighten around the slats of her headboard; she knows he treasures his own free will above everything, and yet he does this just because she asks. 

**Four: Apocalypse Nyka**

Rai is good with knots. In the imaginary childhood she still thinks of as her own, a Nyka who was a simple human boy showed her how to tie near-invisible tripwires across the temple doorways, giggling and hoping to catch out one of the adults. In her training she tied ropes to grappling hooks, made hand- and footholds and slapdash harnesses to pull herself up and over the pockmarked climbing wall. During her short-lived career as a bouncer and general laborer, she lashed cargo together on wagons and tied delicate cordons across doors; later she rigged Alokas’ silks when he needed an extra hand. She knows how to tie knots that bear weight, knots that loosen and tighten, even knots that slither apart when you tug one particular cord.

She knows what she’s doing- certainly none of her partners in more recreational knot-tying have ever complained- but she’s never been fancy about it. The point of rope is to hold someone, and while she often appreciates the picture that makes, it’s not the knots she’s looking at.

For Nyka, though, she studies up. She learns to make elaborate patterns that are an art unto themselves, learns to wrap thick cuffs around and around his arms and legs, to bind him sitting up and lying down, on his own or attached to any object that seems sturdy enough. She makes him struggle against his bonds, goading him to use his full strength. Once, tied to the headboard, he manages to tip the whole bed over; she flips it back and bolts it to the floor before the next time.

Neither of them particularly care about the knotwork, though her engineer’s mind does enjoy mastering the patterns. For the most part, she enjoys it because it takes a long time, and she likes to watch the way her brother relaxes just the tiniest bit more with each knot, each loop and twist of the rope.

She has a hunch, the first time she ties him up; she doesn’t know how much of it is insight and how much is adrenaline, or just her own desires leaking through, but she goes with it anyway. She’s kneeling on the bed, straddling his chest, and she tightens her hand in his hair and says:

“Listen. There’s nothing else you should be doing right now. There’s nothing else you _could_ do, even if you wanted to, until I decide to let you up. All you have to do is look at me and tell me what you want.”

He starts to nod, but her fist in his hair stops the motion, and it looks like it shocks him. He closes his eyes for a long moment. She can feel him straining, watch the muscles in his arms flex as he tests his bonds, and then slowly, the tension seeps out of him as he settles back down. When he opens his eyes again and looks at her, his gaze is clear and steady.

“I want whatever you want,” he says, and she grins down at him, impossibly fond.

“Well, all right,” she says. “We’ll work on that.”

What she thinks and doesn’t say is this: Nyka’s been fighting for his entire life. He was born into a war he could never win, stolen into another that destroyed everything he ever knew. He’s been battered and bruised, killed, resurrected, abandoned, conscripted, and despite it all he still takes every new weight on his shoulders without complaint. So she wraps the rope around his thighs and his chest and his scarred hands and thinks, there is no one here for you to save. There is no cause to fight for, nothing at stake but pleasure, and I can take responsibility for that, yours and mine. She makes him test the ropes every time, watching for the way something in him softens when he realizes he can’t escape, and she thinks: let me give you an hour of peace.

**Five: Shadow Nyka**

Now that they’re back in the timeline she remembers growing up in- even though she knows it’s a lie- Rai tries to keep in touch with her family. Neither of her brothers have expressed any interest in going home or even revealing their existence, and she hasn’t pushed them on it. Maybe it’s easier than dealing with the fact that there are two of them, that one is a monster from childhood nightmares and the other doesn’t belong here at all. 

He sometimes listens in on her stone conversations, though. Mostly she talks to their mother, but one day she inevitably calls while Kiette is visiting and has to roll her eyes through the tales of all her sister’s newest exploits.

“She doesn’t seem that bad,” Nyka says, when she’s finally extricated herself from the conversation. “I was expecting much worse, from your stories.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d grown up with her,” she says, unthinking, and then winces. He offers her half a smile.

“I’ll guess we’ll never know.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. He shrugs it off, so she takes the cue not to dwell, tries to find a teasing tone.

“Really, of all the things, don’t be sad about missing Kiette learning to talk in paragraphs. I wish I could’ve missed it, to be honest,” she says.

“She does...go on a bit.”

“Just a little. Besides, if things hadn’t happened the way they did-” she pauses to take his face in her hands and kiss him thoroughly- “we wouldn’t have gotten to do that.”

“Mmm,” he says, catching her when she goes to pull away and kissing her again. When he lets her go he arches an eyebrow at her, mischievous. “What makes you so sure of that?”

“What...I don’t know, this sort of thing isn’t exactly...encouraged,” she says. “Ma would’ve had a fit, for one.”

“So we would’ve kept it secret. Unless you were in the habit of telling her about all your conquests?”

Rai laughs, placing her stone on the worktable and coming to join him on the bed. “I definitely was not.”

“There you have it, then.”

“I don’t know how we even would have gotten here, though, if everything hadn’t happened,” she says, more to draw the conversation out than because she actually objects to the idea. It isn’t often that he’s comfortable enough to flirt, to sprawl himself sideways on her bed and waggle his eyebrows at her, to talk about the past without any of the burning, bitter intensity he carries with him. She wants to know where he’s going with this.

“Easy,” he says. “Tell me about the first person you ever slept with.”

“His name was Darian. I was about fifteen, I think, home from school for the festival. He lived in town.” She shrugs. “It wasn’t too bad, all things considered.”

“Did either of you have any idea what you were doing, though?”

“Not a clue.”

“So you don’t think you might have asked your older brother for advice?”

“Maybe I would have,” she concedes, and she thinks there’s a chance that it’s actually true. There’s no way to know what their relationship actually would have been like as teenagers, but when she was a child she’d idolized him, copied everything he did whenever she could and demanded his help when she couldn’t. It had seemed like he could solve any problem, once. Maybe she would have held onto that as she got older.

“Okay, then, _big brother_,” she says, propping herself up on one elbow to look at him. “How would you help me?”

“That depends, what do you want to know?” he asks. She considers it for a moment. She and Darian had mostly been able to figure things out, but there were areas where a little preparation wouldn’t have hurt.

“Some tips on how to use my mouth on him probably wouldn’t go amiss. It’s a little intimidating when you’ve got no idea what you’re doing.”

“Honestly, it’s not that hard. As long as you don’t bite him or anything, probably whatever you do will feel good. But, I mean, if you wanted to practice before the big night…” he trails off, waggling his eyebrows at her, and she laughs.

Rai at fifteen was brazen, and honestly kind of bratty. 

“Gosh, how generous,” she says. “That is _such_ a sacrifice for you.”

“It will be if you aren’t any good at it.”

“Well if you’re teaching me, it’ll be your fault if I’m not any good,” she retorts, and starts undoing his laces. He’s not really hard yet. She scoots down the bed to get a good look at him, propping her chin in her hand.

“On second thought, that’s not so intimidating,” she announces. He swats her head.

“You sure know how to charm a boy. I can see why this Darian is so enamored of you.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“No, really, you’re such a flatterer.”

This is not at all how they talk to each other, Rai thinks, a little wildly. In fact, this is more than Nyka usually talks at all, by about threefold. It’s strangely easy to fall into, somehow. It feels natural. She can imagine that it is how they talked as teenagers, if there’s any timeline out there where both of them survived that long, together.

“Okay, so, instruct me,” she says.

“Well, usually you wouldn’t go straight for a guy’s pants before he’s, uh, at least a little excited-”

“I know _that_,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m pretty sure I don’t need to practice kissing or anything, though.”

“Oh, yeah?” he says, lacing his fingers behind his head and grinning at her. “You’re really sure about that?”

“I’m sure I’m better than you, at least,” she says, and climbs back up over him to prove it.

_Fifteen_, she thinks, and _this is your brother_, and wonders at what point her bravado would have failed her. She stops just short, holding herself a few inches above him, and watches his eyes flicker down to her lips.

“You sure?” he murmurs. When she nods just the tiniest bit, he’s the one to crane up and kiss her.

It doesn’t stay sweet for long. He gets his hands up under her shirt almost immediately, sweeping his thumbs back and forth over her ribs and just barely missing her breasts, such a calculated tease that she has to fight not to just grab his hands and put them where she wants them. Instead she shifts over to suck a retaliatory bruise into his neck. The familiar prickle of his beard against her cheek doesn’t quite fit into this fantasy, and she closes her eyes and tries to picture what he would have been like at seventeen.

Maybe he would have just started trying to grow the facial hair that he customarily keeps now, she thinks. It probably would have looked patchy and terrible, but he would have thought it was cool. _She_ would have thought it was cool, too, because no matter how much she snarked at him she probably still would have followed his every lead. She imagines him lanky and rawboned, just coming into his height. Pretty, because he’s always been pretty, but maybe a little awkward, a little clumsy with flirtation, still figuring out how it works. Carefree. Worrying about simple things like picking pockets and charming the temple elders into letting him shirk his duties.

It almost chokes her, how much she loves him, this sly sweet boy who never got a chance to exist. Everything feels tangled. She can see him the way she would have at fifteen, as flashy and sophisticated and close to infallible, and at the same time he seems impossibly young. She feels desperately protective of him, and furious with him, too, for leaving her, for never having existed at all.

“Rai?” says Nyka, quiet and worried, and she blinks herself back to the present. She’s not sure what her expression is doing, but he’s dropped the pretense of the game, reaching out to cup her cheek gently. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she says. It comes out a little rough. She loves this version of Nyka, too, the one who fought through so much to come back to her, and her heart aches for him and the years he missed.

“Yeah, I’m fine, sorry,” she says, and turns her head to kiss his palm. Better to concentrate on the game than to get caught up in what might have been. She shimmies back down until she can prop her chin on his hip, with a full view of where is cock is now curving up through his unlaced pants. 

“So what now?” she asks, looking up at him. He’s still frowning a little.

“Are you sure about this?” he asks, probably meaning in the here and now, but she pretends the question is directed toward her younger self.

“You’re the one who offered to teach me,” she says, summoning her best exasperated teenager impression, “but I guess I can just try to figure it out on my own.” She leans over and licks him, just once, which makes him jump gratifyingly.

“Okay, okay, fine,” he says, capitulation from both versions of him at once. Rai tries, tentatively, to lay them over each other in her mind’s eye, to see him and also the teenager that she’s imagining. It’s easier the second time.

“Like I said, the most important thing is to watch your teeth,” Nyka is saying. “And don’t worry about going too far down, just stick to what’s comfortable. Use your hand on the base like this.” He demonstrates, then moves away so she can wrap her fingers around his cock.

“There you go. And then, you know, just...suck.”

“Wow, thanks for those intricate instructions. Extremely helpful,” she says, because she knows herself well enough to know that she’s always mouthier when she’s nervous. It’s kind of fun, actually, remembering what it was like to be intimidated by something that now seems so simple.

“Well, it’s not like it’s that hard,” says Nyka, which is such a delightful setup that she suspects him of doing it on purpose.

“Looks pretty hard to me,” she says, and shifts over to close her mouth around him while he’s rolling his eyes.

Rai has played a number of roles in bed, but for some reason _innocent virgin_ isn’t one she’s often asked for, she thinks with amusement. She hasn’t spent much time feigning inexperience. Making it actually bad is surely a step too far, and probably more than her pride will allow anyway, so instead she aims for tentative. She keeps everything slow and more delicate than he usually likes, doesn’t take him very far in, pulls off several times to pause and catch her breath. It makes for a good tease. Nyka murmurs instructions and encouragement and occasional apologies when he loses the battle not to thrust into her mouth. It’s a nice touch, she thinks with a rush of fondness, since she knows that he can hold himself stone-still if he wants to. 

Eventually he says, aiming for conversational and missing it by a mile,

“Have you...uh, have you thought about...if you want to spit or swallow?”

She widens her eyes expectantly at him, but figures he’d prefer if she didn’t stop to actually respond.

“Right,” he says. “Well, uh. People say swallowing’s worse, but...in my experience, it’s fast, which is nice. If you wanna spit you have to, you know.” He breaks off and laughs, a sound which trails off into a moan. “_Fuck_. You have to go find something to spit in.”

What experience, she wonders. She tries not to think about where he could have learned any of this, in the years between when he disappeared as a child and when he came back to her. He’s never offered any explanation; she’s never asked. To be completely honest, she’s afraid to.

“Or you can stop and just use your hand,” he continues. “If he’s any good he’ll...give you a warning, like _this_, oh my _god_ Rai.” He scrabbles for her shoulder and then digs his nails into the sheets instead, his whole body bowing up off the bed as he comes. She rides it out with a little more grace than her fifteen-year-old self would have had, but she figures that much deviation from the script is probably allowed, and she doesn’t really want to choke.

She does swallow, though. She sits up afterward and wipes her face, tucking her hair behind her ears and frowning like she’s evaluating the taste.

“Okay, that...could be worse,” she says. Nyka huffs a laugh, tilting his head to look at her. 

“There’s water if you want,” he says, flinging an arm out to gesture at her bedside table. He’s sprawled long-limbed over the bed, chest heaving, clothes rumpled. It’s a good look on him.

Rai gets herself some water and takes her time drinking it, wondering what happens now. She’s usually the one leading, but this whole thing was Nyka’s idea, and she’s content to leave it in his hands.

“So,” he says after a while. “Was that...helpful?”

Still in the scene, then. She fidgets with her water glass and doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Yeah, definitely helpful. Uh, thanks, I guess.”

“Anytime.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Really? Any time at all?”

“Shut up, you know what I meant,” he mutters, and she wonders if the younger him would have blushed. She doesn’t think he physically can blush anymore, and unlike breathing it’s hard to fake. 

“Uh. But also, it’s definitely, um, polite, to trade an orgasm for an orgasm, so.” He trails off. Definitely blushing, she thinks, and adds it to her image of a younger him. It would be sweet, she thinks, especially in contrast to his usual charmer facade. Genuine.

“I don’t need practice with that,” she says, but makes sure it comes out uncertain. She meets his eyes, thinks about the two of them on the cusp of something that can’t be written off quite as easily, wonders if in this other reality she’s ever caught herself watching his hands just a little too long.

“Only if you want to,” he says quickly. “But it’s, you know. Fair’s fair. I wouldn’t want to accidentally teach you to get taken advantage of or anything. Canters each their masters be and all.”

It’s a reference to a line of the thieves’ code they were all taught as children in the temple, a lifetime ago. Rai hasn’t heard it in years. She didn’t even know that Nyka remembered it. She swallows and goes to sit next to him, holding his gaze.

“I guess I shouldn’t get used to bad habits, when you put it like that,” she says. 

“Yeah?” he breathes. She nods, and lets him draw her down.

Rai isn’t used to being completely at someone else’s mercy, but she doesn’t mind so much with him. When he tries to flip her she lets him have it, lets him coax her shirt off, lets him absolutely abuse his knowledge of what she likes to get her off in about two minutes even, three fingers inside her and his mouth at her breast. He might be the only person whose authority she’s ever respected, she thinks, and resolves to never tell him that.

\--- 

They play at being their teenage selves fairly often, after that. They go through several other things that she might conceivably ask Nyka to teach her, but sometimes they drop that pretense, like they eventually would have been forced to do. Sometimes it’s just about recapturing who they might have been. Rai hadn’t thought she’d ever be able to revisit the world where Nyka was really the brother she remembered, kind and gentle and teasing, undoubtedly in charge. He always had the best ideas, and the best plans for not getting caught. He was always teaching her something. She hadn’t thought she’d ever get it back, not even for an hour or two, the way she once trusted him to help her and protect her and to always, always be there.

**Six: Apocalypse Nyka**

She doesn’t ever mention the idea of revisiting their younger selves to the other Nyka. There would be too many missteps, places where their worlds and their memories don’t line up. He never, ever talks about it, but he had another Rai once, the one who could share his what-might-have-been. Rai- this Rai, the only Rai, now- tries not to think about that, or the guilt implied in her own existence. 

When she and Apocalypse Nyka pick different roles to play, they usually pretend to be strangers. He books them time at the practice grounds on the other side of the city, where no one knows them well enough to care if they flirt, and they meet up as chance sparring partners. They’re well matched in hand-to-hand. It’s not either of their specialties, but it means they can strip down and get close, and that they don’t do too much damage-- neither of them pulls punches. Nyka maybe angles to get her thighs around his head more often than is strictly necessary, but since that takes more skill than just letting the fight unfold naturally she’ll let him have it.

She always reminds herself to consider him the way she would a stranger. He’s exactly her type, honestly, the kind of person she would have counted herself lucky to pick up at the practice grounds back in the life she used to have-- tall and well-muscled and handsome, with an easy temper and an easy smile, game for a good time with no expectations. Sometimes he invites her for a drink afterward, both of them paying less attention to the small talk than to her running her foot up his leg under the table. Sometimes they rile each other up enough sparring that she jams a chair under the door handle of one of the changing rooms and just jumps him there, against the wall or on one of the unforgivingly hard benches.

It’s a different scenario, but the point is the same as the game she plays with the other Nyka. Sometimes it’s good to just let it all go for a while, to pretend that they’re simple, normal people with simple, normal lives, that the worst outcome of any risk they might take is getting banned from the east practice grounds of the city for indecent behavior. 

**Seven: Shadow Nyka**

Once, she tells him to come to her in his insubstantial form. She lays him out- well, he lays himself out, at her command- and runs her hands carefully over every inch of him, and everywhere she touches he changes from shadowstuff to human. She takes it tenderly, agonizingly slow, and by the time his whole body is solid and warm and real she’s so desperate to get him inside her that she can barely get her own clothing out of the way. Both of them are crying.

They don’t do that again.

**Eight: Apocalypse Nyka **

Rai means what she says, that first time she ties Nyka down, about him telling her what he wants. It isn’t a game or a challenge. She just wants, a little desperately, to make him happy.

He seems to be happy, on the whole; he’s made friends and a home and a life here, and he swears that he’s glad she found him and dragged him into all this. Still, she can never quite forget that she cost him everything he ever knew. His world was a hard one, but it was his, and they left it crumbled in their wake. She remembers sitting with him outside a besieged Ellesmere on another timeline, the memories of his life slipping faster and faster from his grasp, knowing he was reaching the end of what he could take and aching for any way at all that she could help.

It’s good, when he asks for things she can easily give him.

As time goes by he gets better at telling her what he wants, and she’s glad of it; she prides herself on having good instincts for that sort of thing, but instincts only go so far. Some days he just wants her to decide. Some days he says _touch me_ and she does, she spends hours touching him until he gasps for breath, his hands white-knuckled in the sheets and all of him sheened with sweat, until he trembles and twists half into her hands and half away, and she learns to read him well enough to sit back every time he’s just at the edge. 

She would let him come, if he asked. Instead he holds out longer than she ever would have made him wait, holds out while she coaxes him open with three of her fingers, then four, maddeningly slow, while she almost pleads with him, _come on, baby, just tell me what you want, I’ll give you whatever you need_, while she slides down on him and stays there and gets herself off with him hard inside her, while he shakes and bites his lip and leaves deep indents from his nails on her hips and doesn’t ask, and doesn’t ask, and still doesn’t ask.

**Nine: Shadow Nyka **

Rai still attends their council meetings, even though she rarely has anything to contribute these days, when it’s all magic and divine theory. Nyka deigns to show up to maybe one in four. She’s starting to think he has the right idea; she’s both bored and irritated, and fantasizing about punching Saren Raithe in the mouth to shut him up will really only get her so far. 

She sends Tymora skittering under the table to Nyka, who looks like he’s having even less of a good afternoon than she is, and uses the mechanical whisper function that only he can hear.

<_If you can come up with an excuse to get out of here, I’ll suck you off in the back room_> she says. He gives her a long, considering look, then signs come after me discreetly against the tabletop. A few minutes later he does a credible job of storming out of the room, upset at one of Saren Raithe’s make-everyone-worship-me plans. 

“Shit, I’d better check on him,” Rai murmurs worriedly to the room at large, and follows him out. 

He’s sitting on a counter in the little room off their meeting space, which was probably once a functional pantry and is now mostly dust and a few mismatched dishes. 

“Better out here,” he whispers; sound carries reasonably well through the walls, and they’re still within the same privacy bubble.

“Much better,” Rai agrees. “And hey, nice dramatic flair there. Very believable.”

She doesn’t mind dropping to her knees in the dust. A deal’s a deal, and she is actually having a _much_ better time out here, with Nyka’s draped robes hiked up and his whole body tensed to keep still so he doesn’t rattle any of the dishes. He returns the favor afterward, Rai gritting her teeth and trying as hard as she can not to spill any sensation at all over the bond, and maybe she’s a little more into it than she expected. Possibly a lot more. There’s something about the need to be fast and quiet, something about the idea that their friends are all debating seriously on the other side of the wall and have no idea what Rai and Nyka are up to on this side, something about how someone could walk through the door at any second to check on them…yeah. It’s not like it’s that surprising, really, that she comes fast and so hard she almost loses her balance, biting marks into her own arm to keep quiet. She’s always liked adrenaline. 

Nyka steadies her until she’s sure she’s not going to fall over, his eyes dancing.

“I’ll keep that in mind, then,” he whispers, and she smacks him gently and starts trying to make herself presentable.

\---

She doesn’t think much of it until a few weeks later, when he approaches her hesitantly and says,

“I want to try something. If you want to.”

“You know me, I’m always up for trying new things,” she says, but he shakes his head.

“Maybe not this one.” 

She waits for a minute, but he doesn’t seem inclined to say anything else, just watches her warily.

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of whether I want to try it,” she says eventually. “It would help if you told me what it was. I can’t promise I’ll want to do it, but I do promise that I won’t think less of you for it.”

“No, it’s not like that,” he says. “It’s…I noticed, the other day, how much you liked it when we were in the back room with everyone right there.”

“I’ll own up to that,” she says, curious. If that’s what he wants to talk about, it hardly seems to merit this kind of cautious lead-up.

“And I was thinking, that if you like the idea of sex where we’re one step away from getting caught, or we have to keep quiet, or maybe we’re in public-” he pauses, waits for her to nod that yes, she does like all of those ideas- “well. I do have a way to keep us invisible, almost anywhere you wanted.”

Oh. Oh, god. He was right to be hesitant; she feels sick to her stomach even considering the idea. She’s come a long way in her fear of shadows, she’ll shadow-port with him or even one of the others with barely a thought these days, but shadow-porting is practically instantaneous. You can steel yourself for anything, for less than a second. The difference between that and just staying in the shadow world, voluntarily, is like the difference between pricking your finger and having a knife stuck in you. 

And then he wants her to _enjoy_ it.

“I told you you wouldn’t want to,” he says. “It’s okay.” 

It doesn’t seem like it’s okay, she thinks, looking at his carefully neutral expression. The problem is that it isn’t about the sex at all, really; she doubts that he cares that much about exploring her penchant for exhibitionism. It’s about him. She’s trying her best to love him for who he is now, she _is_, but she can’t deny that there are aspects of his life that she still shies away from. She feels abruptly and completely miserable.

“It’s not about you,” she says feebly.

“Isn’t it?” he asks, and it’s gentle but it’s damning too. It _is_ about him, and the way she lost him, and the way she can’t separate that from what he’s become. 

“Let me think about it,” she manages, and flees.

The first thing she does is have a panic attack at Alokas, who’s used to her and lets her drag him into an entirely unnecessary workout routine without complaining. (Well, with minimal complaining. Well, he lets her do it, that’s the main thing.)

The second thing she does is actually think about it. Rai isn’t one to let things fester or to avoid a challenge, but even so she approaches the idea cautiously at first, around the edges. She does okay with shadow-porting now. She doesn’t want to let Nyka down. She likes pushing her limits. She does, in fact, like adrenaline, and there’s probably no more adrenaline-filled situation she could get herself into in the whole world, no matter how many timelines they find.

She goes back to Nyka a week later, fear still an uncomfortable knot in the pit of her stomach, but determined.

“I want certain conditions,” she says. “First of all, can we do this and still stay solid, you and me?”

He thinks about it for a moment, then nods. “Yes. I can use shadows to hide us here instead of bringing us to their plane.” 

Her every instinct is crying out to abandon this idea right now. Instead she says,

“Okay. And we try it in daylight first.”

Another nod.

“And I don’t want there to be any other shadows there. I know the whole point is having shadows, but not the ones…the ones who talk, or watch. Just normal shade.”

“As if I would let them spy on you,” he says, baring his teeth a little. It actually makes her feel a bit better. 

“Good. All right, then.” She takes a deep breath, looks around the room. It’s a fairly bright day, but there’s enough shade cast by the various pieces of furniture that she thinks he’ll be able to make do. “Shall we?”

“Now?” He asks, taken aback.

“Might as well,” she says, and doesn’t add, _before I lose my nerve_.

That first time, she lasts about a minute. She would have thought it was longer, if not for the clock on the wall; it feels like an eternity, strung tight, every nerve in her body screaming danger. It’s basically an endurance test. Nothing about it is sexy, although at least it’s a little distracting to kiss Nyka, a little comforting to have his arms strong and solid around her. The fear gets the better of her quickly, though, a horrible feeling like cold incorporeal fingers crawling up over the back of her neck, and she has to say _stop!_ and pull away gasping and try not to hyperventilate. 

He’s surprised that she wants to try a second time.

“That’s the only way to get used to it,” she says, with what’s probably an unconvincing smile. “It must have scared you too, at first, right?”

His eyes go far away for a moment, and something she can’t read crosses his face, but he just says, 

“Yes.”

They try again the next day. It still isn’t sexy but she lasts longer this time before she has to tap out, and well, Rai has always been competitive. She goes after her own record with dogged determination. It gets longer and longer— practice, she thinks, but also just the repeated evidence that nothing bad will happen, that both of them are still there, unchanged, afterward. She reminds herself that she trusts him. There was a time when he was always showing her something new, and even though some of it was dangerous- a leap between rooftops in a new route through the town, or a bit of petty thievery that was less petty and more likely to land them in actual trouble- he never once let her get hurt. 

The final piece comes one day when they’re doing nothing shadow-related at all. It’s late afternoon and Rai is thoroughly enjoying the things Nyka’s doing with his mouth, concentrating on not pulling his hair harder than he actually enjoys and technically sort of staring upward, though she’s not really paying attention to the way the afternoon light makes the window pane shadow slant across the ceiling. Well, she isn’t, until it gives her an idea. Maybe starting cold and working their way up wasn’t the right way to go about this after all. 

“Nyka,” she gasps, not waiting for any second thoughts to appear, “make it dark.”

He doesn’t ask if she’s sure. The shadows gather in around them, cold and weird and alien. Nyka slides two fingers into her, which is a _good_ idea, and she shudders and manages to say,

“Yes, _perfect_.” He hums in response, which she can both hear and feel, even though she can only see glimpses of him in the ever-shifting darkness. She keeps her eyes on the sunlit ceiling- it’s so strange, to be enveloped in darkness but to be able to see out- and arches her hips into his mouth and _yes_, there it is, there’s the moment where the fear-adrenaline crests over into making her whole body feel everything threefold, where the instincts that are telling her to run lend their urgency to something else entirely. She comes on a wail and probably does pull his hair too hard, in the end, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He banishes the shadows as soon as she’s done, too, so she can feel secure while her heart rate comes down, and she gives him a shaky grin and thinks that no one who looked at this man and saw a monster would ever understand how kind he truly is.

It takes some months, but they do venture out of her room in the end. It turns out that she does, in fact, love it when he tries his best to make her break her silence in the corner of a half-full tavern. She loves it when they have to hold as still as possible so they don’t shake supposedly empty furniture, loves it when he has to whisk them away seconds before someone stumbles on them by accident, loves stripping both of them and riding him completely naked but totally invisible in the public square. 

She doesn’t ever stop being afraid. It’s too rooted in her, she thinks, the memory still too sharp after all these years. The whole shape of her is grown around it, like a tree around an iron stake. She can tame it, though, make it do her bidding, when there’s daylight on the other side of the shadows and Nyka’s hands are solid and real in hers. 

**Ten: Apocalypse Nyka**

Sometimes the ropes aren’t enough to get Nyka out of his head, or one or the other of them is too restless for that kind of meticulousness. Rai has other ways to distract him, anyway. She likes to set him challenges, like having him get her off a specific number of times within half an hour (the number keeps climbing, though she’s edging into the territory where that game is going to start getting painful), or without the use of his hands. 

He doesn’t enjoy pain nearly as much as some of her previous partners have, but he likes a bit of it, and he especially likes to be left with reminders of what they’ve been doing. She likes that too, watching him move just a little gingerly the next day, knowing it’s because of her. She starts leaving vicious hickeys all over his body, half because of the little breathless whining sound he makes when she uses her teeth on him and half because he can never seem to stop touching the marks through his clothes, after. She’s working up to fitting her whole hand inside him. The idea of it makes him crazy but she’s taking it slow, slower than she needs to, probably, because that’s half the fun.

Nyka can take a lot. He may not want to bleed, but he likes the pain that comes from endurance. She gives him simple physical tasks to focus on, makes him hold backbends and squats and whatever other difficult positions come to mind while she touches him. He’s strong enough to lift and carry her, too, which is amazing. Rai loves being fucked against the wall. The first time she tells him what she wants, he grips her thighs and hoists her up and she wraps her legs around his waist and just holds on, not especially caring that her back is getting scraped to hell against the plaster. She grits out a litany of praise, _yes, oh, that’s it, Nyka, that’s good, that’s perfect_, and he comes fast, gasping against her shoulder.

“Don’t you dare move,” she tells him. He sucks in a deep breath and holds her there, thighs trembling with the effort, until she finishes herself off, one hand between her thighs and the other tight in his hair. It’s fantastic. 

He likes proving himself equal to- or maybe worthy of- her challenges. She never sets him up to fail.

**Eleven: Shadow Nyka**

Although he can tolerate an amount of pain that even Rai occasionally finds shocking, this Nyka doesn’t actually like it-- though sometimes he does enjoy _causing_ pain. Rai herself has always been happy to mix roughhousing and sex, but every now and then she’s up for something a little more considered, more methodical. It works out.

There’s more to it than just the way their preferences happen to align, though; there’s a fierce, shameful thrill in the way he allows her to wield him as a weapon, to point him where she wants him. Both of them feel it. It’s not something she ever did back when she could actually control him, but once he was his own master again- finally, for the first time since the age of eleven- she stopped being quite so careful. It was impossible not to notice the way he relished following her commands, now that he didn’t have to. He liked it best when she pointed him at some target that he already wanted to fight.

It’s a dangerous thing to play with, both because he’s been weaponized before and because she’s uncomfortably aware that he uses her as his moral compass most of the time. She could probably ask him to kill someone and he wouldn’t think twice about it, or ask any questions. It’s terrifying, and somewhere deep inside she likes the thought of it, and that’s terrifying, too.

All in all, it’s best for everyone if she only points him at herself. She’s not ashamed to admit that she wants it, too, that she gets off on the curl of his fingers around the handle of a dagger, the way his hands are impossibly deft and graceful and sure when he skates a blade over her skin. Sometimes she steals unwanted clothes off of laundry lines and lets him cut them off her. She trusts her life in his hands, trusts him to be only as much of a weapon as she needs. 

She bleeds exactly as much as she wants to.

(Someday, she thinks, she’ll have him use the knives on the other Nyka-- never cutting him, just whispering over his skin with the promise of it held in check, both of them intent and unafraid. It would require him to trust her orders completely, the other Nyka to trust her protection completely. They’re not there yet. She likes to imagine it, though.)

**Twelve: Apocalypse Nyka**

Rai buys the first new rope on a whim, because it happens to catch her eye as she’s walking through the market, and she’s in a good mood and has coin to spend. She drops it in the drawer and doesn't think much of it. The first time she pulls it out for Nyka, though, he notices immediately.

“Where did that come from?” he asks, tilting his head from where he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for her.

“I picked it up the other day,'' she says, tossing it over so he can inspect it. “Thought it had a nice heft to it.”

He looks it over carefully, even though it’s just a length of rope and not much different than any other. 

“You didn’t have to,” he says eventually. “What you had was just fine.”

“Only fine? I aim for much better than fine, you know,” she says, teasing, and he smiles as he hands the new rope back to her.

“What you had before was terrific, how about that? It was great. It was fantastic.”

“Smartass,” she says, and goes to put him where she wants him.

The next week, though, she’s in the market again and finds herself drifting over to the same stall. She comes away with another rope, this one almost indisputably intended for the use she’s going to put it to; it’s somehow silky-soft without being inclined to slip out of any of the knots she tests it with, and it’s dyed a lovely charcoal grey that would be completely unnecessary for any practical use. It’s a little expensive, but she doesn’t mind. If the world of this precarious bubble ends it won’t matter at all, and if they do manage to survive she’ll have plenty of time to recoup it, one way or another, and bigger things to worry about besides. 

Nyka frowns at the rope when she brings it out.

“We really don’t need any more,” he says.

“We don’t need a lot of things, strictly speaking, but I liked it,” she says. “Here, feel.”

He runs it through his hands and then wraps it several times around his palm, testing, as thorough as and studied as he is with his sword, and Rai has to swallow hard around a sudden rush of fondness for him.

“It is nice,” he says grudgingly, and she doesn’t miss how he’s rubbing the trailing end between his thumb and forefinger. “But honestly, you don’t have to coddle me. There’s nothing wrong with the ropes we have, I like them.”

“Who says this is about you?” she counters. “I thought the color would look good against your skin, and I wanted to see if I was right, so I bought it. Can’t I spend my own money for my own pleasure?”

To her amazement, he actually blushes.

“And were you right?”

She catches his hand and turns it gently in hers, twisting her fingers in the looped rope so it tightens against his skin.

“I think so,” she says, grinning at him, “but further testing may be required.”

She’s even more deliberate with her knots than usual. She ties his hands in front of him where he can see, has him kneel on the bed and binds his thighs to his ankles to keep him there. The dark rope does actually look quite striking against the green cast of his skin. She would buy it again in any color at all, though, for the way Nyka reacts to the feel of it.

He’s quiet about it, but she knows him; she can read the tension in his muscles, his shuddering intake of breath when the trailing end of the rope just bushes against him as she works. She slows down even further, ghosting each loop of her pattern silk-soft over his skin before she pulls it tight. He’s fully hard by the time she finished binding his legs.

“There,” she says, stepping back. “Go ahead and test it.”

He blinks at her for a moment, visibly collecting himself.

“Feels sturdy,” he says, but he obediently strains against his bonds before subsiding. “It’s good. I probably could get at the knots on my ankles if you left me alone to work on them for a few minutes, but other than that, no.”

“Very honest,” she tells him approvingly. “Guess I’ll just have to keep you occupied, then.”

She settles herself so she’s straddling one of his thighs- which makes her own breath catch a little, never let it be said that she’s not in this for her own pleasure, too- and kisses him thoroughly, scratching her fingernails through the short hair at the base of his skull. The rope cuffs on his wrists are soft against her side. Without the use of his hands, he’s holding the two of them up with just his stomach muscles, and she’s not being careful about keeping her weight of him. When she shifts forward to press briefly against his cock, he gasps and his whole body jerks under her, but he keeps them balanced. It occurs to her that she knew he would; no part of her was even braced to catch them.

“I love how strong you are,” she murmurs, easing back. He presses his face into her shoulder and she takes the opportunity to grind herself down on him for a long moment, maybe longer than she means to, but it’s hard to stop. She has other ideas, though, that involve the way Nyka is twisting his wrists restlessly back and forth, just enough to feel the slide of the rope. She’s not even sure he knows that he’s doing it.

“Hold steady,” she warns, and leans over his shoulder so she can pick up the rest of the rope from behind him. It means putting almost her whole weight on him, and also putting enough pressure on his erection that it’s just on the line of painful, judging by the sound he makes. He braces her perfectly anyway.

There’s just enough of the rope left for her to create a sort of harness across his torso. It looks a little like a sunburst, a circle just below his sternum with lines radiating out from it in every direction. It’s a complicated bit of work, one she doesn’t attempt very often, but taking a bit of extra time works just fine for her purposes today.

Usually, spending this much time on his bindings leaves Nyka quiet and pliant under her hands. With this new rope, though, this experiment that she didn’t realize she was running, tension seems to be winding tighter and tighter through him the longer she takes. When she slowly and utterly deliberately drags it across his nipples, he shudders all over and makes a gasping, almost pained noise that she’s never heard from him before. 

“You okay?” she murmurs, pausing in pulling the lines up over his shoulders, and he has to swallow hard before he says yes.

Rai finishes with his chest and steps away, looking him over. There are about a million things she wants to try with him would up like this. Part of her wants to just take him apart, maybe shove his legs wide and suck him until he begs, maybe try the rope directly on his cock. Part of her wants to see what happens if she does let him try to work his way out of the bonds, if he’ll drive himself crazy with the feel of the knots slipping apart. God, he’s perfect. She wants to do _everything_ to him. 

He’s settling a little while she thinks, though, and that’s definitely not in her plans. She cocks her head as if considering the sunburst pattern.

“I don’t think that came out quite right,” she says. “Sorry, I haven’t practiced it much. I’ll have to do it again.”

He absolutely doesn’t believe her, but she doesn’t really care about that. She cares about the way he watches her fingers when she starts undoing the knots, the way his eyes go wide and wild when she lets each line slip down his chest, one after the other. By the time she’s tied the whole thing back in place, he’s shivering continuously, tiny tremors up and down his body. She puts both palms on his sides to feel it. He seems to be able to hold himself steady for a moment through sheer force of will, but soon enough he starts trembling again.

“Sorry,” he whispers, and she hushes him.

“Don’t ever apologize,” she says, and kisses him, running her hands up and down over the ropes until he whimpers. “Don’t apologize, you're amazing. Also, I love this rope, and I’m getting more of it tomorrow.”

She does get more rope, and doesn’t stop there, either. At first it’s about the discovery of this sensualist streak under all of Nyka’s practicality, which utterly delights her- she buys a set of scarves, too, and softer sheets- but it very quickly becomes more than that. It’s the way he squirms every time she produces a new gift, caught between excitement and a hot, flustering shame at his own pleasure. She’s seen other people have that kind of reaction before, but never to something so innocuous. 

It’s not that he won’t spend his own money, but he reserves it for weapons and armor, mostly, sometimes sturdy clothing or hearty food. She’s never seen him buy anything just because he liked it. He seems to think of luxury and indulgence as immoral, and she presses against that boundary carefully at first, testing whether it makes a difference if she puts on some kind of thin pretense of buying things for herself rather than as gifts for him, trying to divine how much of the shame is the good kind, the guilty pleasure kind, that sometimes you want somebody to make you feel. 

He keeps protesting the money she spends, the way none of what she brings home is necessary, but he never actually tells her to stop outright. She gets more confident with it. She buys a paddle that’s designed more for leaving marks than for pain, a new cock for herself with a warming charm built into it, a host of other toys that she picks out more for the joy of giving him things than because they’re likely to use them more than once or twice. When he flushes and fidgets and looks away and still doesn’t tell her not to, she buys him a thick leather cuff to wear on one forearm. They come up with a hand sign that she can flash him from across a crowded room to say _tighten it another notch now_. It makes her a little crazy, watching him tug at the buckle right there in public, like the impression it will leave on his skin is a mark she gave him without touching him once. For some reason playing like that when they’re out in the world ignites the hungrily possessive part of her- she knows she has it, but neither of her brothers seem to mind, at least- and she has to ball her own hands into fists to keep from dragging him out of the room right then and there.

Eventually, because Rai is who she is, she makes him a machine. She uses the core from one of her changeable grenades, which is easy enough to modify once she comes up with the idea. Really, she’s just dialing its capabilities down from damage to sensation: fire becomes heat, ice becomes cold, lightning becomes just a trace of electricity. She quite likes it as a toy. The main point of it, though, is that she ties Nyka down and leaves him there to watch while she spends an hour dismantling a perfectly good weapon and reforming it into an unneccesary, utterly indulgent instrument of pleasure, just for him. It’s not subtle, but she never claimed to be.

It’s worth it for the look on his face when she finishes. _The war is over_, she thinks, and waggles the toy at him.

“Ready to try it out?”

**Thirteen**

Time has gotten a little hard to reckon, lately, a little unreal, but Rai thinks it’s been something like twenty years since she first lost her brother. She still dreams about it, sometimes: hissing whispers in the dark, her little light guttering out, Nyka’s hands slipping out of hers. The dreams don’t carry quite the grief they used to, but they still leave terror in their wake. Both Nykas know to let her cling to them hard when she wakes. They know to banish the shadows from the room, though one does it with an otherworldly growl and the other has to use flint and steel. Rai holds on to them, and lets the familiar, dim light slow her racing heart, and thinks how lucky she is to get a second chance like this. She’s going to do right by them, this time.

Her two brothers need vastly different things, but Rai has it covered. She takes care of what’s hers.


End file.
